The bad terrorist men are coming to get you! Oooga booga booga! Isn't it funny how Republicans have continually intoned they are the only ones able to keep us safe from the scary men, but when the Obama administration actually decides to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and five others for their terrorists acts, they turn--to a one--into the biggest WATBs at the thought of these Guantanamo detainees in a super-max prison standing trial through the American court systems. For all their jingoistic "We're #1" exceptionalism, these Republicans have remarkably little faith in our criminal justice system. And who better to represent these little p*ssified pseudo-toughs than Rudy "A Noun, A Verb and 911" Giuliani? He scored a trifecta of appearances, besting Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who only will be on two shows. Meanwhile, the Republicans aren't done scaring Americans about health care reform, and you can bet the Pete Hoekstra on Face the Nation, Newt Gingrich on Meet the Press and Mitch McConnell on Fox News Sunday will be amping up the rhetoric.

ABC's "This Week" - Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

CBS' "Face the Nation" - Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich.; Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.

NBC's "Meet the Press" - Clinton; Education Secretary Arne Duncan; former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga.; the Rev. Al Sharpton.

NBC's "The Chris Matthews Show" - Panel: Eugene Robinson, Katty Kay, Peggy Noonan, Michael Duffy. Topics: Will Obama Suffer Longterm Damage For Afghanistan and Health Care Delays? Will Sarah Palin's Book Tour Convert Her From Republican Rogue to Frontrunner? Meter Questions: Will President Obama Sign a Health Care Reform Bill This Year? YES: 5
NO: 7; Will Delays Over Afghanistan and Health Care Hurt Obama's Image Longterm? YES: 5 No: 7.

CNN's "State of the Union" - Giuliani; White House senior adviser David Axelrod; Sens. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., and Judd Gregg, R-N.H.; Gov. Brian Schweitzer, D-Mont.

CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" - Fareed gives you a sneak peak into the HBO film he narrated entitled Terror in Mumbai. Plus, an incisive panel discussion on President Obama's first trip to China and the most important relationship in the world - between Beijing and Washington.

CNN's "Amanpour" - Amira Hass, Ha'aretz "Occupied Lands" correspondent, and Aaron David Miller, former diplomat who served six U.S. Secretaries of State discuss peace prospects in the Middle East.

"Fox News Sunday" - Giuliani; Sens. Jack Reed, D-R.I., and Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.; Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

So, what's catching your eye this morning?

We can certainly come to our own conclusions, since we're not hearing any official explanation. But it would be nice to know why the last administration (you remember, from the Party of Personal Responsibility?) covered this up - and why the Obama administration isn't doing anything about it:

WASHINGTON—The military lawyer that represents an Afghan youth who spent roughly seven years in U.S. custody says the Defense Department has repeatedly ignored his requests for a war crimes investigation into the detainee’s treatment.

Air Force Maj. David Frakt, the attorney for former detainee Mohammed Jawad, says over the past 16 months he sent multiple memos to Defense Department and military leaders asking them to account for what a military judge called “abusive conduct and cruel and inhuman treatment” of his client. Jawad, who was arrested when he says he was 12 years old for allegedly tossing a grenade at U.S. military, was moved from cell to cell 112 times during a 14-day period to disrupt his sleep patterns, according to military documents. Frakt said he believes the treatment constituted torture, violated the Geneva Convention, war crime laws and Defense Department regulations.

“Why has no one – no one has been held remotely accountable for this,” Frakt said in an interview with Raw Story. “This is a mandatory investigation. It’s not optional, you can’t just sweep it under the rug… but they did as far as I can tell.”

As first reported in The Washington Independent, Frakt wrote in memos to Defense Department officials: “Accordingly, I believe I have an affirmative obligation to report the incident to my chain of command,” listing military rules that mandate reporting possible war crimes to a superior.

Both a federal district court judge and a U.S. military commission judge have questioned the use of sleep deprivation, also called the “frequent flyer” program, on Jawad.

When military officials changed Jawad’s cell 112 times between May 7 and May 20, 2004, roughly once every three hours, military Judge Stephen Henley, a U.S. Army colonel ruled “the scheme was calculated to profoundly disrupt his mental senses.” Although officials were allowed to use such tactics during interrogation, Jawad’s attorney Frakt said he was not interrogated months before or months after the sleep deprivation occurred.

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Sen. Diane Feinstein told Fox News' Chris Wallace that she supports sending detainees from Guantanamo Bay to California maximum security prisons. "In a maximum security prison, I don't worry about it, provided the prison is set up to accommodate it, and I believe we have facilities that are," said Feinstein.

John Amato:

DiFi knows all about prisons since California has such an incredible prison population that is regulated by asinine rules. Also several idiotic ballot initiatives have made it harder to lower the prison population by easing sentences on drug abusers instead of drug dealers. That being said, Diane at least takes the step of not being a bed-wetter when it comes to taking Gitmo prisoners. We as a country certainly know how to incarcerate people.

Bond acts like a frightened little child when talking about Gitmo prisoners and spreads the falsehood that Gitmo prisoners will suddenly be hanging out with the general population of a prison so they can grow al-Qaeda cells behind prison walls and encourage those nasty criminals into criminal behavior. It's absurd and another lunatic right wing talking point. He knows what Maximum security means and if we built new prisons to hold detainees then it would create jobs for the state of California or any state willing to take them. It would also close the disgusting Gitmo hell hole chapter from the Bush era and end it as a recruiting tool for terrorists, a win-win situation all around.

Transcript via CQ Politics:

FEINSTEIN: Well, as you know, I’m one that believes very strongly Guantanamo should be closed, and I believe it can be done.

I’m also one that’s somewhat familiar with the prison structure in the United States. And I know that there are maximum security prisons from which no one escapes in the United States, which are isolated from neighborhoods.

And no one is going to put these people in anyone’s neighborhood, as some have tried to say.

WALLACE: So you’ll be OK with having some of these detainees in California?

FEINSTEIN: Yes. In a maximum security prison, I don’t worry about it, provided the prison is set up to accommodate it, and I believe we have facilities that are.

WALLACE: Senator Bond, you get the last word.

BOND: I -- this is one of the areas on which Senator Feinstein and I disagree. I think Guantanamo is the best place to hold these hardened criminals. We don’t want to put them in our general prison population where they have and will radicalize other prisoners.

They will draw their friends in Al Qaida to come into the area from the outside. I wouldn’t mind seeing them at Alcatraz, but my California friends have minimum amount of high enthusiasm for that.

But if they’re sick, they’re transferred to the federal Springfield, Missouri medical facility in my state, and my constituents and I think that would be a very bad idea.

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On This Week with George Stephanopoulus:

The Obama Administration is trying to engineer a soft-landing for the President's promise to close Guantanamo by January 22, 2010.

Friday morning White House officials told me that some detainees would still be in Gitmo after the deadline after this story broke in the Washington Post. And in our 'This Week' interview, Defense Secretary Robert Gates confirmed that "it's going to take a little longer" than promised to close the prison.

Here’s our full exchange:

STEPHANOPOULOS: A major story in "The Washington Post" suggesting that the president's deadline of January 22nd for closing Guantanamo will not be met. And White House officials tell me that at least some prisoners will still be in Guantanamo on January 22nd and beyond. How big a setback is that and how long will it take to finally close Guantanamo?

GATES: When the president elect met with his new national security team in Chicago on December 7th...

STEPHANOPOULOS: 2009.

GATES: ...last year, this issue was discussed, about closing Guantanamo and executive orders to do that and so on. And the question was, should we set a deadline? Should we pin ourselves down? I actually was one of those who said we should because I know enough from being around this town that if you don't put a deadline on something, you'll never move the bureaucracy. But I also said and then if we find we can't get it done by that time but we have a good plan, then you're in a position to say it's going to take us a little longer but we are moving in the direction of implementing the policy that the president set. And I think that's the position that we're in.

STEPHANOPOULOS: That's where we are. So the deadline of January 22nd will not be met?

GATES: It's going to be tough.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And -- and how many prisoners will be there on January 22nd, do you know?

GATES: I don't know the answer to that.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Is it -- but, as you said, it's going to be tough and likely will not be met.

GATES: We'll see.

Looks like Glenn Greenwald caught Stephen's attention as well. From The Colbert Report:

Investigating prisoner abuse will be a political food fight, and that is messier than torture.

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Hats off to GottaLaff at The Political Carnival for her work on bringing this travesty of justice to light, and for prodding David Shuster to put Gitmo lawyer Barry Wingard on the air to tell his client's story. Hats off to David Shuster as well for recognizing that this was something that has flown below the radar of most of the main stream media and deserved to be covered. You can read more on her exchange with Shuster via Twitter here.

Prior to this interview, Barry Wingard had given up on the media being willing to allow the public know what has happened to his client and why he ended up in Gitmo in the first place. From GottaLaff:

I recently watched a chunk of so-called cable “news”. A tiff between Sarah Palin and David Letterman monopolized all three hours.

Meanwhile, not one word was uttered about a Kuwaiti man named Fayiz al-Kandari who has been “detained” (read: tortured) in three different prisons for nearly 8 years.

I’ve had the good fortune to talk with Al-Kandari’s lawyer. I’d link to his op-eds, but I can’t, because, despite commitments from major newspapers, they were never published. I’ll provide substantial quotes from him, instead.

With that, allow me to introduce you to Barry Wingard and Fayiz al-Kandari:

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And let's give credit to the Dems who put the "bi" in bipartisan on this issue! Yes, let's hear it for those Dems who live and die by the prevailing winds of public opinion - who would never dream of actually educating the voters instead of knuckling under to their uninformed emotions. You go, Weathervane Dems! Woo hoo!

The Obama administration has all but abandoned plans to allow Guantanamo Bay detainees who have been cleared for release to live in the United States, administration officials said yesterday, a decision that reflects bipartisan congressional opposition to admitting such prisoners but complicates efforts to persuade European allies to accept them.

Four Uighur detainees, Chinese Muslims who were incarcerated at the U.S. military prison in Cuba for more than seven years, arrived early yesterday in Bermuda, where they will become foreign guest workers. An administration official said the United States is engaged in negotiations with other countries, including Palau, an island nation in the western Pacific, to find places for the remaining 13 Uighurs held at Guantanamo.

The Uighurs, who were ordered released by a federal judge last year, never counted America as an enemy, according to the men's lawyers and human rights groups, giving the administration grounds to argue that they should live in the United States. Picked up in Pakistan and Afghanistan in 2002, the Uighurs were later cleared of the "enemy combatant" label but remained in minimum-security confinement at Guantanamo.

Attempting to settle non-Uighur detainees in the United States would generate even greater congressional opposition, and the administration has decided not to pursue it broadly, an administration official said yesterday, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. But he said there may yet be "a few" candidates for settlement in the United States among the dozens of Guantanamo detainees who have been cleared for release.

Congressional Democrats yesterday reached agreement on a war-funding bill that would allow detainees to be sent to the United States for trial. The draft bill included no provision for prolonged detention without trial, a step that President Obama has said will be necessary to incarcerate detainees who are too dangerous to release but who cannot be prosecuted.

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Sheldon Whitehouse on The Rachel Maddow Show explains how everything we've been told about the Bush administration's torture program is not true.

Maddow: You are on the Intelligence Committee which of course is reviewing the treatment of high value detainees in what's described as being an exhaustive investigation. You gave a very powerful speech on the Senate floor two nights ago about torture. We played a long piece of it and you talked about the degree to which the American people have been misled on the issue.

In what way do you think that we've been, that we've been misled. What do you think is wrong about the way we've been talking about and fighting about torture?

Whitehouse: The story line Rachel has been that, here are these al Qaeda terrorists who are tougher than anyone, and if you put them in front of FBI agents who have to give them Miranda warnings and inexperienced Army interrogators, they get no place. But then you turn them over to the tough, experienced CIA interrogators and then suddenly, very significant information that saved lives begins to emerge.

Maddow: That sounds like the outline of the President's speech on that in September 2006. That's exactly what he said.

Whitehouse: And exactly what Vice President Cheney had been saying and it's been the party line on this subject really from the very beginning.

Maddow: Yeah.

Whitehouse: The problem is that as you drill into it, you find out that all of the different elements aren't true. You find out that the CIA was actually the amateurish organization in interrogations and the FBI agents and the military interrogators were the true trained professionals.

Whitehouse goes on to explain that they're not at the stage in the investigation where chain of command issues are yet raised. He says there is justification for those issues to be raised during separate, executive branch investigations, which may be yet to come, and where executive privilege does not apply.

Sen. Whitehouse's speech on the Senate floor below the fold.

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Peter King is back at it again trashing the ACLU. This time he blames the ACLU for the delay in the release of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. If that nasty ACLU had not brought all those lawsuits forward we'd have already wrapped up those kangaroo court military tribunals.

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Joan Walsh and Liz Cheney in Campbell Brown's "Great Debate" segment. Good on Joan Walsh for not allowing Liz Cheney to talk over for the entire segment. More pundits who go up against her could take a few lessons from Joan. She hit back at Cheney for interrupting her right out of the box and never let up for the rest of the interview.

BROWN: Time for our time for our "Great Debate."

And tonight's premise: Bringing Guantanamo Bay detainees to America is a security risk.

Some Republicans say that is exactly what happened today, when Ahmed Ghailani was brought from Guantanamo to New York to face trial.

And joining us to debate tonight, Liz Cheney, the former vice president's daughter, who also served in President Bush's State Department. She thinks Gitmo prisoners do not belong on American soil. On the other side, Joan Walsh, who is editor in chief of Salon -- Salon.com.

And we want your opinion too. Vote by calling the number on the bottom of your screen.

First, we're going to have opening statements from each, 30 seconds on the clock.

Liz Cheney, the premise is: Bringing Guantanamo detainees to America is a security risk. Make your case.

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Even though the Democrats caved into Republican fear mongering over housing the Guantanamo Bay detainees in American prisons is seems the town of Hardin, Montana, is more concerned about the jobs it would bring than being afraid of keeping the prisoners in their back yard. Hardin's town council voted unanimously earlier this month to approve the offer.

Olbermann: So you and your neighbors are willing to take a hundred detainees that the FBI Director and some Senators and foreign countries are afraid to? Why are you willing to do this?

Smith: Well they're going to be in here. They're not going to go anywhere. I think we have a secure lockup and the next part is really the outside issue with how do you protect it. I guess we maintain if you look around, we're pretty flat. We think that it would be easy to protect and if you can't protect 3400 people in Hardin, Montana, we've got larger problems in this country.

Right in Dick Cheney's back yard. Imagine that!

(Originally posted on Wednesday May 20, 2009 9:18pm)

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President Obama displayed this morning exactly why he won the confidence of voters last year:

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama forcefully defended his plans to close the Guantanamo detention camp Thursday and said some of the terror suspects held there would be brought to top-security prisons in the United States despite fierce opposition in Congress.

Obama spoke one day after the Senate voted resoundingly to deny him money to close the prison, and he decried "fear-mongering" that he said had led to such opposition.

He insisted the transfer would not endanger Americans and promised to work with lawmakers to develop a system for holding detainees who can't be tried and can't be turned loose from the Navy-run prison in Cuba.

"There are no neat or easy answers here," Obama said in a speech in which he pledged anew to clean up what he said was "quite simply a mess, a misguided experiment" at Guantanamo that he had inherited from the Bush administration.

Partial transcript here:

I stand here, today, as someone whose own life was made possible by these documents. My father came to our shores in search of the promise that they offered. My mother made me rise before dawn to learn their truths when I lived as a child in a foreign land. My own American journey was paved by generations of citizens who gave meaning to those simple words – "to form a more perfect union." I have studied the Constitution as a student; I have taught it as a teacher; I have been bound by it as a lawyer and legislator. I took an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution as Commander-in-Chief. And as a citizen, I know that we must never – ever – turn our back on its enduring principles for expedience sake.

I make this claim not simply as a matter of idealism. We uphold our most cherished values not only because doing so is right, but because it strengthens our country and keeps us safe. Time and again, our values have been our best national security asset – in war and peace; in times of ease and in eras of upheaval.

Fidelity to our values is the reason why the United States of America grew from a small string of colonies under the writ of an empire to the strongest nation in the world.

It is the reason why enemy soldiers have surrendered to us in battle, knowing they’d receive better treatment from America’s armed forces than from their own government.

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Republicans have been all over the teevee telling us what a swell place that Guantanamo Bay can be. Club Gitmo! And if we close it down, we'll be getting terrorists in our neighborhoods!

So of course, Senate Democrats quickly caved on funding the prison's closure:

WASHINGTON - In a major rebuke to President Barack Obama, the Senate voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday to block the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to the United States and denied the administration the millions it sought to close the prison.

The 90-6 Senate vote — paired with similar House action last week — was a clear sign to Obama that he faces a tough fight getting the Democratic-controlled Congress to agree with his plans to shut down the detention center and move the 240 detainees.

But listen to the Republican arguments and you just have to scratch your head.

There was John Ensign saying the health care was better than most Americans get. Then Sen. James Ihofe of Oklahoma went on Fox yesterday with Neil Cavuto and declared that "there's no place like it, the treatment is good."

But Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby really took the cake this morning on with Joe Scarborough on MSNBC:

Shelby: The Democrats saw the vote coming, should have, and saw that nobody in America wants a terrorist in their neighborhood. That's the bottom line.

Scarborough: Well, the Democrats were so sure six months ago they were going to shut down Gitmo. What happened?

Shelby: Well, they might shut it down. But I don't know why they would want to shut it down and bring terrorists into the United States of America, even into some of our neighborhoods, if they deem them not to be terrorists anymore. That's a dangerous road to go down, Joe.

Evidently, Shelby doesn't believe that when it turns out that some of these suspects are innocent that we should permit them to go free.

And, as Glenn Greenwald says,: "Is there anything the right wing isn't afraid of these days?" (His column on this is a must-read, as always.)

Moreover, Republicans (including Cavuto) are claiming that no one in the USA wants the prisoners. But that's not true. Already, folks in Hardin, Montana, are lining up:

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No, it's not what you think. Apparently guards decided to get their last kicks in, so to speak. Hopefully someone will bring this to Obama's attention:

LONDON (Reuters) - Abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay has worsened sharply since President Barack Obama took office as prison guards "get their kicks in" before the camp is closed, according to a lawyer who represents detainees.

Abuses began to pick up in December after Obama was elected, human rights lawyer Ahmed Ghappour told Reuters. He cited beatings, the dislocation of limbs, spraying of pepper spray into closed cells, applying pepper spray to toilet paper and over-forcefeeding detainees who are on hunger strike.

The Pentagon said on Monday that it had received renewed reports of prisoner abuse during a recent review of conditions at Guantanamo, but had concluded that all prisoners were being kept in accordance with the Geneva Conventions.

"According to my clients, there has been a ramping up in abuse since President Obama was inaugurated," said Ghappour, a British-American lawyer with Reprieve, a legal charity that represents 31 detainees at Guantanamo.

"If one was to use one's imagination, (one) could say that these traumatized, and for lack of a better word barbaric, guards were just basically trying to get their kicks in right now for fear that they won't be able to later," he said.

Talk about "Not In My Backyard"! Obviously, the prisoners have to be held somewhere. Wonder where?

When President Barack Obama signed an order Thursday forcing the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention center within a year, he put in sharp relief the possibility that some of the world's most potentially dangerous terror suspects could be hauled to Kansas.

The U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth is on a list of imperfect choices for holding nearly 200 men whose legal status is as murky as their backgrounds.

Obama's long-promised action only heightened chances that Leavenworth could be the new focus for a contentious debate over how to prosecute non-citizens for alleged actions overseas, and whether their legal limbo has a foreseeable end.

"We're a military community and people understand that we need to do what the commander-in-chief says," said Andrea Adkins, Leavenworth's economic development administrator. "But there is a security threat any place where these people are located."

Kansas politicians and local government officials have complained loudly about the possibility of America's most troublesome captives being brought to the Midwest. Opponents' arguments center on security - both that the military prison might not be equipped for such high-risk inmates, and that the base and the community might be targeted by terrorists.

"This is just not going to happen on our watch," said Republican Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas.

Andrew Sullivan says we have bigger problems if inmates can get out of super-maximum security prisons.